Rachel Blackmon's EP: Songs for Healing and Hope

To my friends I know and those I don’t yet,

What an honor you’re here! My name is Rachel Blackmon, and I’m delighted to invite you into the creation and release of my second EP. My first solo project was a compilation of three singles in 2022 that I released in an effort to stretch myself creatively. Honestly I just wanted the challenge of putting music out when I’m so prone to keeping songs tucked away in journals and voice memos on my phone. This upcoming project started no differently, but the shape it’s taken and continues to take, is one of a more communal effort. I’ve realized that this time around the songs have been formed by a desire to speak into burdens the past five years have brought for me and in the same breath for so many other dear folks.

Having been a long time in coming, some of these songs have been quietly sitting with me since 2020, while others are brand new. Together, they span a deeply personal journey—reflecting on questions about inner tension, grief, healing, and the ways we seek peace and reconciliation in the world around us.

Since 2020, life has changed a lot. My dad survived lymphoma. I lost my grandmother. My own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer for a third time. I became a mom. Through all of this, I found myself wrestling with my role in church and community, asking: How do we hold hard emotions and still show up to worship Jesus honestly and genuinely love one another? How do we grieve in community? How do we become ministers of reconciliation- reconciling with brothers and sisters in Christ, our neighbors, our enemies- when we’re just trying to reconcile our own conflicting thoughts and feelings?

These songs are honest conversations between me and the Lord, but they often ask questions to a broader audience, of which you’re invited to be a part. They’ve helped me name things I’d usually try to avoid and that confrontation has been a kind of therapy, reminding me that we don’t have to run from the tension. God doesn’t. And neither do we.

So here we are, endeavoring the process of seeing these songs out into the world and to you. As this campaign launches we will have just begun recording, and we hope to release the EP by early summer. All the funds will be going towards paying our friend Daniel (who is producing, mixing, playing instruments, making magic), paying other musician friends, covering the mastering of the album (the process that makes music sound good coming through your speakers), and also covering additional childcare expenses while friends help us with our daughter Sylvia.

In addition to simply raising funds for the record, we’ve wanted from the onset to support Chattanooga organizations taking care of our refugee neighbors. We’re donating 10% of whatever is raised to this end, and the entirety of anything we raise above our goal. The songs are already oriented around healing, so why not leverage all we have unto that end!

Thanks for coming along this far. The gratitude I already feel towards so many of you encouraging this project into being is truly difficult to articulate adequately. I think truly the best way I know how is by getting these songs from my heart into your hands.

With love and great joy,

Rachel